DOMINATIONtelling them the risks, or when an employer hires someone under false
pretenses to exploit her hard work. But an agentic relationship can be
beautifully humane, too. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet,
wrote: “Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every
man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.”
No matter how ignorant, degraded, or foolish a man is, there is
something he knows, something he has mastered, that Emerson val-
ued. Emerson sought to find intellectual worth in all people, regardless
of their station in life. Such a relationship is agentic because the rela-
tionship is about gain—gaining knowledge. It’s not about the H&N
pleasure of having company. What makes this dopaminergic quotation
particularly interesting is that Emerson called this man “my master.”
He wrote of domination through submission—self-submission in the
form of deference, humility, and obedience.
SUBMISSIVE MONKEYS, HUMBLE SPIESWhen researchers at the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute injected a
dopamine-boosting drug into stump-tailed macaque monkeys, they
observed an increase in submissive gestures, such as lip smacking, gri-
macing (the monkey version of smiling), and holding out an arm to
another monkey for a gentle bite. On the surface this response doesn’t
make sense. Why would dopamine, the neurotransmitter of dominance,
trigger submissive behavior? Is there a contradiction here? Not at all.
In the control circuit, dopamine drives domination of the environment,
not necessarily the people in it. Dopamine wants more, and it doesn’t
care how it gets it. Moral or immoral, dominant or submissive, it’s all
the same to dopamine, as long as it leads to a better future.
Consider a spy stationed in a hostile country, trying to gain access
to a government building. While prowling around a back alley, he runs
into the janitor. The spy treats the janitor as his equal, perhaps even his
superior, in order to gain his cooperation—submissive behavior aimed
at dominating the environment and reaching his goal.